A revolutionary crisis, or revolution, is any political crisis propelled by illegal (usually violent) actions by subordinate groups which threatens to change the political institutions or social structure of a society.
Some revolutionary crises result in great changes in politics and society, as the Russian and Chinese Revolutions; some result in great political changes but few changes in social life outside of politics, as the English Revolution; some result in hardly any change at all and are hence considered unsuccessful revolutions, as the revolutions of 1848 in Germany.
The word revolution first appeared in political writing in fourteenth-century Italy and denoted any overturning of a government; such events were seen as part of a cycle in the transfer of power between competing parties, with no great changes in institutions implied. However, since the French Revolution, revolution has become associated with sudden and far-reaching change. It is this particular sense of the word that has been carried to fields other than politics, as in the Industrial Revolution or scientific revolutions. Revolutions have causes, participants, processes of development and outcomes. No two revolutions are exactly alike in all these respects, thus no general theory of revolutions has proven satisfactory. Understanding revolutions requires theories of causes, of participants, of processes and of outcomes of revolutions that stress the variations in each element and how they combine in specific historical cases.
Many of the key issues in studies of revolution were set out in the nineteenth century by Marx and Engels (1968 [1848]). Marx viewed Europe’s history since the Middle Ages as a progression through various modes of production, each one more fruitful than the last. Bourgeois revolutions, exemplified by the French Revolution of 1789, were necessary to destroy the privileged feudal aristocracy and the agrarian society over which it presided. However, the resulting political freedom and material benefits would extend only to the class of professionals and businessmen who controlled the succeeding capitalist society; thus a further revolution in the name of labourers remained necessary to extend self-determination and the material benefits of modern industrial technology to all. The major elements of this view—that revolution is a necessary agent of change; that such change is progressive and beneficial; and that revolutions, in both cause and effect, are intimately related to great historical transitions—pose the articles of faith for practising revolutionaries and the chief research problems for academic analysis.
The work of Tocqueville (1856) has assumed increasing importance. Tocqueville’s analysis of the French Revolution stressed the continuity of the old regime and the post-revolutionary state, and the greater centralization of state power that followed from the revolution. Similar continuities have occurred elsewhere: the Russian imperial bureaucracy and secret police, the Chinese imperial bureaucracy, and the Iranian personal authoritarian state have been replaced by similar, albeit more powerful, post-revolutionary versions. Thus the extent of the historical transformation associated with revolutions appears less striking in practice than in Marxist theory.
Since the mid-1960s, social scientists seeking the causes of revolutions first focused on changes in people’s expectations and attitudes, but later moved to an emphasis on institutions and the resources of states. Gurr (1970) argued that when people’s social opportunities no longer accorded with their expectations, either because expectations were rising too quickly, or welfare was falling, feelings of ‘relative deprivation’ would make fertile ground for popular opposition to governments. Johnson (1966) suggested that any large and sustained ‘disequilibrium’ between the economic, political and cultural sectors of a society—such as education increasing more rapidly than economic output, or economic organization changing more rapidly than political organization—could lead many individuals to withdraw their allegiance to the current regime. Huntington (1968) emphasized expectations in the political sphere, arguing that if popular expectations for participation in politics came to exceed a country’s institutional procedures for political participation, unmet demands for political participation could lead to an explosion of popular activity directed against the current regime. However, Tilly et al. (1975), in empirical studies of collective violence, found that strikes and riots did not occur most frequently during times of deprivation, such as periods of falling real wages or falls in economic output. Nor were strikes and riots especially common during times of disequilibrium, such as periods of rapid urbanization or industrialization. Instead workers acted to protect and defend their interests whenever the opportunity was available; those opportunities depended on shifts in the balance of power between workers and the employers and states that they faced. Tilly’s ‘resource mobilization’ view argued that whenever conflict arose over economic or political issues, the incidence of popular protest depended chiefly on how the abilities and the range of actions open to those at odds with the current regime compared with the resources of the regime and its supporters. Skocpol (1979), emphasizing the differences between states and the importance of international competition, led the way in developing a social-structural perspective on revolutions, which views revolutions as a consequence of state weaknesses combined with institutions that provide aggrieved elites and popular groups with opportunities for effective collective action.
The origins of revolutions do not appear to reside in an exceptional level of deprivation or disequilibrium. Instead, revolutions occur when difficulties that are successfully coped with in other times and places—wars and state fiscal crises—occur in states with institutions particularly vulnerable to revolution. Skocpol identified three institutional features that make for such vulnerability:
1
A state military machine considerably inferior to those of nations with which the state is normally in competition.
2
An autonomous elite able to challenge or block implementation of policies sought by the central administration.
3
A peasantry with autonomous village organization. One could also add:
4
large concentrations of artisans and labourers in and near inadequately policed political centres.
These elements, in various combinations, have played a role in the origins of the major revolutions of modern times: England 1640 (1, 2, 4); France 1789 (1, 2, 3, 4); Mexico 1910 (1, 2, 3); China 1911 (1, 2); Russia 1917 (1, 3, 4); Iran 1979 (2, 4). Peasant organization has often been supplied by a revolutionary party, rather than automonous village organization. This functional substitution has led to different, characteristically peasant-party-based, revolutions: China 1949; Vietnam 1972; Nicaragua 1979.
A military or fiscal crisis in an institutionally vulnerable state may begin a revolution; however, the process of revolution and the roles of various participants vary greatly. Certain processes appear to be, if not universal, extremely common: an initial alliance between moderates seeking reform and radicals seeking far-reaching change; involvement in international war (in part because nearby states fear the revolution spreading, in part because revolutionary leaders find the nationalist fervour generated by external wars useful); a gradual fission between moderates and radicals, with the latter triumphing; a civil war as leaders of the revolutionary parties seek to extend their control throughout the nation and eliminate opposition; the emergence of authoritarian rule by a single dominant leader. Other variables—the extent and autonomy of popular participation, the extent of civil war, the degree and permanence of radical triumph, and the duration of autocratic rule—range from high to low across revolutions, depending on the resources available to various groups, the skills of individuals, and the luck of political and military battles.
The outcomes of revolutions are equally diverse. These depend not only on the factors that caused the revolution, but also on the vagaries of the revolutionary process, the influence wielded by external countries and the problems and resources faced by the eventual victors in the revolutionary struggle. The French and English revolutions, though differing greatly in the level of popular uprisings, resulted eventually in similar regimes: monarchies in which possession of private property was the key to political participation and social status. By contrast, the Russian and Chinese (1949) revolutions, the former with a level of autonomous popular participation, both rural and urban, akin to that of France, the latter with a chiefly rural peasant-party revolution, both resulted eventually in socialist party-states, in which membership and rank in the state party are the keys to political participation and social status. Mexico’s revolution led to a hybrid capitalist party-state, in which political participation is directed by and through the state party, but private wealth is the chief criterion of social status.
Evaluations of the material progress made under post-revolutionary regimes are also mixed. There are cases of great progress in health and literacy, such as Cuba; but the ability of post-revolutionary regimes to provide a generally higher material standard of living than similarly situated non-revolutionary regimes is yet to be demonstrated (Eckstein 1982).
The role of ideological changes in causing revolutions and shaping their outcomes is hotly debated. Most revolutionaries have proven quite pragmatic in modifying revolutionary programmes as seemed necessary; Russia under the New Economic Plan of the 1920s, and China in the 1980s, have embarked on such pragmatic paths. At other times ideological fervour has taken precedence, as in the Jacobin years of the French Revolution, and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China. Ideological programmes are thus a rather unpredictable, if far from dominant, element in shaping revolutions.
Ideology in a broader sense, as an overall cultural perspective, has been a more uniformly important factor. Eisenstadt (1978) has noted that the key to revolution lies in the coalescence, in a time of political crisis, of diverse movements—peasant uprisings, elite political revolts, religious heterodoxies—into a widespread attack on the institutions of the old regime. Thus the main role of ideologies in revolutions has been to bring together diverse grievances and interests under a simple and appealing set of symbols of opposition. For this purpose, any ideology that features a strong tension between good and evil, emphasizes the importance of combating evil in this world through active remaking of the world, and sees politics as simply one more battlefield between good and evil, may serve as the foundation for a revolutionary ideology. Thus puritanism, liberalism, communism, anti-colonialism and Islam have all proved adaptable to providing symbols for revolutions. Studies of peasants’ and workers’ revolts have stressed that traditional ideologies—the communal ideology of ‘members’ against ‘outsiders’ of the peasant village and the craft guild—can also motivate actors in revolutionary crises. None of these ideologies of themselves brought down governments; but they were crucial in providing a basis for uniting diverse existing grievances under one banner and encouraging their active resolution.
Revolutions have occurred in a remarkably varied range of societies. Pre-industrial monarchies, Third-World colonies of industrialized states, modernizing dictatorships, and totalitarian party-states have had their governments suddenly overturned by popularly backed movements for change. What all regimes that have fallen to revolutions had in common was a closed state with limited elite access and few channels for the populace to influence changes in leadership. If this pattern holds, the arena for future revolutions will be the remaining authoritarian states of Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and South-east Asia, and the party-dictatorships of Communist China and Cuba. The advanced industrial democracies may see strikes and demonstrations, but are unlikely to witness revolutions.
The degree of violence in revolutions is also highly variable, and this seems rooted in the diverse nature of the societies in which revolutions have occurred. Societies with higher levels of industrialization and education, and with less influential conservative and counter-revolutionary forces, seem to be able to sustain popular revolutions without descending into mass violence and terror. This is the hopeful basis for expecting positive results from the revolutions in the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. However, societies with large agricultural populations, low-to-moderate levels of literacy, or a large proportion of powerful conservative or counter-revolutionary elites, tend to fall into revolutionary spirals of struggles for power and internal violence, sometimes escalating to civil war. This suggests that new crises may be anticipated in parts of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia. Even in parts of Eastern Europe, including many of the successor states to the Soviet Union, the clash between reformers and still powerful conservatives may ignite new explosions. Revolutions are thus likely to continue to shape, and reshape, world politics for years to come.
Jack A.Goldstone
University of California, Davis
References
Eckstein, S. (1982) ‘The impact of revolution on social welfare in Latin America’, Theory and Society 11.
Eisenstadt, S.N. (1978) Revolution and the Transformation of Societies, New York.
Gurr, T.R. (1970) Why Men Rebel, Princeton, NJ.
Huntington, S. (1968) Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven, CT.
Johnson, C. (1966) Revolutionary Change, Boston, MA.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1968 [1848]) The Communist Manifesto, London. (Original edn, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, London.)
Skocpol, T. (1979) States and Social Revolutions, Cambridge, UK.
Tilly, C., Tilly, L. and Tilly, R. (1975) The Rebellious Century 1830–1930, Cambridge, MA.
Tocqueville, A. de (1856) The Old Regime and the French Revolution, New York.
Further reading
Goldstone, J.A., Gurr, T.R. and Moshiri, F. (eds) (1994) Revolutions of the Late Twentieth Century, Boulder, CO.
Moore, B. Jr (1966) Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Boston, MA.
Wolf, E.R. (1969) Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, New York.
